Currently Reading: The Present Age by Soren Kierkegaard 📚

Inspired by Matthew Crawford’s recent bit on AI and wedding speeches

What does it mean to outsource a wedding speech to AI? In a very real sense, says Crawford, it means to not show up to the wedding.

And this is, of course, what AI means for most of the things we so happily and thoughtlessly apply it to: It means to not show up for the life you were made to live.

It’s tempting to label the excerpts from Kierkegaard that Crawford uses as nothing short of prescient, but they are probably more accurately described as deeply insightful but oh-so-human.

As Walter Kaufmann puts it, in what is probably the most interesting preface ever written:

Read for the flavour, chew the phrases, enjoy the humour, feel the offence when you are attacked, don’t ignore the author’s blunders, but don’t fail to look for your own shortcomings as well: then the book will make you a better man than you were before. But if you should find it too strenuous to read for the joy and pain of an encounter with a human being who, exasperated with himself, his age, and you, does not—let’s face it—like you, then leave the book alone and do not look for marvellous anticipations!

I shall do my best.

Finished reading: Democracy and Solidarity by James Davison Hunter 📚

Really, very, and quite disappointing. Without question or surprise, Hunter’s description is spot-on and his diagnosis illuminating. But while he kinda-sorta points in a few hopeful directions — namely, hope itself, but also forgiveness, the practice of distinguishing between the morality of citizens and systems, a de-emphasis on the primacy of voting as a marker of citizenship — he says very little about them. In the final chapter, Hunter does say he is hopeful and that he believes “the times are full of real opportunity if one has eyes to see them.” True enough, I think hope. But he follows this immediately by admitting, “Sadly, my eyesight is not very good.”

😒

And that’s about 8 pages from the end of the book.

Among the many reasons for the gloom, I’m sure that the status of our media and social media is high on the list. The healthy, dynamic public square, however elusive it has always been, is a noble and necessary aim. But our current modes of communication and self-education preclude, it seems, even the desire for a public square.

Regardless, in a sense, of America’s particular history, a central prognosis is stated rather bluntly and abruptly in Chapter 11, “The Great Unraveling.” Hunter refers to the “nebulous” status of “truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real and unreal,” and admits that “the problem will remain entrenched for as long as [our current] media environment exists.” And, aside from the generic need to convince nearly the entire population to “stop snorting and smoking that shit” — i.e. get off social media and turn off the television — who has a solution for that?

Sadly, no one does. (Though some are doing a lot of work in that direction.)

Don’t get me wrong. A clear diagnosis and a sober view of history are worth their weight in democratic gold. As for prescription, Hunter’s previous guidance for “affirmation and antithesis” is as relevant and urgent as ever. And to his credit, he is still nothing if not truthful about the situation. As Makoto Fujimura put it, “hope can be hope only if it admits that which is darkest while urging toward the light.”

I plan to carry the baton of hope as best as I can and to continue pointing in as many good directions as I can find. (Jürgen Moltmann is not a bad place to start 🙂)

But, man, if this book didn’t feel like a really bad handoff…

📚Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly — by putting it on the shelf behind all the other books you’ll read “very soon.”

Oh boy! A letter from across the pond and something from Robin Sloan that I don’t even remember signing up for. Some days, the mail box is just full of goodies 🙂

Sanctuary of the Lord of Tula, Mexico (Photographed by Rafael Gamo)

Amanda Iglesias:

How does one define “church architecture”? A whitewashed chapel, topped by bell and steeple? A vaulted Gothic cathedral? Further, if you wish to learn about church architecture, where would you begin? Generally, definitions are relegated to the domain of the art historian, with textbooks written to organize “church architecture” into a cleanly defined lexicon of styles and substyles.

However, I’d like to position “church architecture” as the convergence of two distinct domains: church and architecture. The domain of the church is not a fixed religious entity but rather a spiritual frontier. Second, the domain of architecture is not merely a profession but an intellectual frontier. Thus, “church architecture” should not be understood as a fixed definition but rather as an emergent territory between the ever-expanding frontiers of knowing and being.

One of my most memorable experiences of “church architecture” was a corrugated sheetmetal shack that occupied the corner of a terraced slope in Petku, Nepal.

The church had an open, arched sheetmetal foyer before the entrance. Inside, the room spanned perhaps 10 feet by 20 feet, with floral rugs covering the entire floor. At the front was a slightly raised podium, covered by a turf rug. On it, surrounded by two small benches, sat a stained lectern decorated with a cross over a white and orange Plumeria.

And that’s it. A limited opportunity for church architecture if there ever was one. Significantly, though, it didn’t feel limited by its limitations. It was quaint, clean, reverent, and attended to.

As Alain de Botton put it:

We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives… before architecture can have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being “moved” by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist.

It was in 2015 when I visited Petku, and that little church building existed within the sadder wider reality of a devastating earthquake.

But it — the building and its attendees and attenders — existed beautifully within that wider reality.

From a 2012 interview with Jürgen Moltmann:

Were you not then [after the war] obliged to do theodicy?

No. I am convinced that God is with those who suffer violence and injustice and he is on their side. He is not the general director of the theatre, he is in the play.

In your new book, Ethics of Hope, you say that people can be awakened from a dark night of the soul and again experience an unconditional love for life. Is that what happened to you after the war?

Well, three things I still remember. One was the cherry tree blossoming in Belgium in May ‘45, which gave me an overwhelming feeling for life after the darkness and coldness of the prison camp.

And then the humanity of the Scottish workers and their families, who were amazing. They felt solidarity with us because they felt they, too, were victims of violence and injustice from their own government, in 1926 when Churchill [broke] the General Strike [and sent them back] down the mines.

And then there was the Bible I received from a chaplain. These three things convinced me to love life again.

“Something to do with dignity, something to do with luck, something to do with grace.”

“I only drive when I want to.”